Abortion - the Termination of Pregnancy

Abortions

Abortions; Webster's dictionary defines it as "the termination of pregnancy". Canada is one of the few countries that allow legalized abortions. Why would Canada do such a thing? Isn't it sort of like murder? So 1 group, from the HIF 2O0 class decided to go into further analysis about this matter using both secondary and primary research. They surveyed 20 grade 12 students, 10 being males and 10 being females, at Harold M. Brathwaite Secondary School on their opinions of abortions. They wished to figure out mainly how students from graduating classes from high school, or in other words how grade 12 students from both genders at Harold M. Brathwaite viewed abortions. Most of the student completed the survey seriously and answer all the questions having valid points for both pros and cons when dealing with abortions. Furthermore they took notes on a couple of site dealing with abortions and finding out many important statistics. It amazing what can be determined after analyzing the 2 sets of data.

Doing secondary research from websites enhanced the group's knowledge on abortions and the statistics of abortions. Some of the facts that we found out were that about 20 000 teens have abortions each year, between the ages of 16 to 19, 96% of males have engaged in sexual intercourse at least once and 68% being females. Another fact that was learned was that the number of teens that have abortions increased from 26% in 1974 to 45% in 1994. Also, about 105 000 abortions are performed each year. Each Site gave us insight on many thinks dealing with abortions. They generally talked about what abortions include of and what parents also think about their teenage sons and/or daughters having abortions. One of the sites weren't too helpful because the main focus was about what parents thought about teenage children having abortions, which was not the focus of the project. An essay was also used, written by a 19-year-old teenager who talked about their opinions on abortions. This site was a good site to get information from because the person who this article was based on shared a lot of their inner feelings such as why they don't agree with abortions yet how it is acceptable in some cases where it is necessary. I would rate this site a 9 because it gave us the perspective of teenage opinions on abortions that we needed. Lastly but certainly not the least, one site was really helpful since it gave a lot of statistics about abortions, how many were done a year, etc. Some significant statistics that was learned was that in 2002, women aged 20-29 had the highest number of abortions, 54,560. The next highest numbers of abortions were the teens, aged 15-19, with just a little over 19,000. The last age group was 30-34, with 16,000. Lastly, women under the age of 15 had 337 abortions. During 1998-2000, there were 121 977 abortions in Ontario. There are about 20 000 teens a year who get abortions. Between the ages 16-19, 96% males and 68% females have had intercourse at least once. The number of teen abortions has increased 26% to 45% from 1974 to 1999. Please refer to Appendix 4.1.

For the primary research part the group decided to perform a survey. At Harold M Brathwaite, 20 students were surveyed with a questionnaire containing 10 questions regarding abortions. During period 3, one student asked 10 males and 10 females from grade 12 to complete their survey hoping to get a bias opinion from both genders. The reason why they choice grade 12's was because they were the last class of the year which would be graduating and they wished to find out specifically the opinions of abortions from teenagers by the end of high school. The goal was to figure out exactly how the student in the society felt on abortions and their view on whether abortions were right. It was graphed in such a matter that the opinions of both males and females could be seen and exactly how they differed. The three questions that were graphed with the results are: Are you sexually active? In results, 80% of females were not sexually active and 20% were, 70% of the males were sexually active and 30% were not, refer to Appendix 1.1. Another one of the questions that was graphed was if you or your partner were a pregnant teenager, would abortion be an answer in your opinion? There were 3 choices to respond to, yes, no or I haven't thought about it. Out of the females, 2 said yes, 3 said no, and 5 said I haven't thought about it. From the males, 4 said yes, 3 said no, and 3 said I haven't thought about it, refer to Appendix 1.2. The last question that was graphed was what age group would be the most likely to consider abortions? In results, 2 males thought it was between the ages of 12-15, 8 thought it was between 16-19, and none of them thought